Authentic Trust is Greater Than Transactional Trust

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WAYNE RIVERS: Hi, everyone. This is Wayne Rivers at Performance Construction Advisors, where We Build Better Contractors.

This week I want to talk about trust, specifically authentic trust is greater than transactional trust. I've got some definition work to do there. But this came from a blog from my friend Arlin in September of this year, and he made the point, which all of us know that trust can be really hard to earn and establish, and is awfully easy to lose. Trust can be very fragile. We've all seen instances of that in our lives and in our businesses. So in a business setting, you think about all the things that are taking place in your construction company. You're growing, you've got seasoned employees, but you've got less seasoned, newer employees on board too. And so bridging the trust between folks that have been with you a long time, folks that are pretty new, that can be tenuous at times.

You've got on construction projects, you're always forming new teams, so sometimes you can keep the same people together, but often you're putting new teams together. All your jobs are unique practically. So you've got unique sites, unique jobs, unique owners, unique architects, unique engineering, unique this, everything is unique, and you've got to reassemble and reassemble, and break up teams to make all that work. So a question, what's your default trust setting?

Now, what about this is important to you? I can't imagine any industry in which trust is more important than construction because you're trusting not only your people, but you're trusting all of your trade partners. You're trusting your owners, you're trusting the regulators that do inspections and things like that. It's an industry absolutely built on trust, and I think that's so important.

Arlin in his article writes about everybody has a trust battery. This was a new concept for me, a trust battery. And everybody starts a relationship with a certain charge. So think about what yours is. Is your trust battery always on at 75% or maybe 25%? Are you skeptical about people when you meet them? I'm the worst. My trust battery's at like 99% all the time. I just think everybody's going to be wonderful and treat me well, and we're going to get along and sometimes I'm disappointed, but I think that's the way you should approach opportunities and relationships.

He talks about Edgar and Peter Schein, who may be coined this idea of authentic trust, and they said that transactional trust is the shallowest form of trust. What's that mean?

Transactional trust means it's quid pro quo. I'll extend only to you the amount of trust that you extend to me, and it's very fragile and tenuous. If I see your trust going down for some reason, then my trust automatically goes down too. So that is a very tenuous type of trust. Personal trust is deeper. It means that people connect on a certain level with genuine empathy, and they create psychological safety for each other in their interpersonal transactions. The third type of trust is the deepest, intimate trust. It's a deep commitment. It's where you're not only related, so to speak at work, but you can see yourself being in a relationship, a friend or an acquaintance relationship with people outside of work. It's a deeper kind of trust.

The Scheins say that you should aim for level two. You should aim for connecting with people as a genuine empathy. And then if you find yourself rising to level three where it's intimate trust, then that's just wonderful. That's great for everybody concerned, but try to start at level two.

Okay, five tips. Five tips for getting to authentic trust versus transactional trust. Number one, reflect on your own trust defaults. Reflect on that battery charge, and it starts with you. If you are unable to trust others, then you're not going to get that reciprocally. It's just not going to happen. Number two, start with at least 50% full trust battery. Give people the benefit of the doubt, assume goodness and good intent. Number three, take the first step yourself. Now, that's not without risk, right? You extend trust to somebody and they turn out to be less than savory. That's a risk we all take. That's human nature, I'm afraid.

Number four, focus on patterns, not incidents. I can't imagine any of us can honestly say that we've been perfectly trustworthy in a hundred percent of all of our relationships. There's always something. I think about my own marriage. I must've disappointed Lisa a thousand times, but she trusts me because I've not disappointed her a hundred thousand times. So she doesn't look at every transaction. She looks at the pattern of transactions over the course of our 34 years together.

And the fifth thing, treat trusting others as human nature, not risk management. If you think about trust simply as risk management, it reduces it to a transactional level, and I can't imagine how you get to genuine, empathetic trust with that as your starting point. So basically stop treating trust as a quid pro quo and see it more as a value which stays constant. The concept of the trust battery is good, and the concept of value treating trust as a value is also great.

What do you think? Let me hear from you. wrivers@performanceconstruction.com. This is Wayne Rivers at Performance Construction Advisors, where We Build Better Contractors.

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